We are all Laurie

We all think we are Jo. Or in 2019, we might even imagine ourselves to be Amy. Very few of us might still identify with Meg, but I doubt many consider themselves Beth. Similar to Hogwarts houses, there is an urge to identify with one of the March sisters and often Jo is our Gryffindor, the popular choice. We grow up alongside her, identify with her, and love her. Deep down, we suspect that Frederich Bhaer—despite 2019’s Louis Garrel—is not really that perfect for Jo. Moreover, many readers and audience members prefer Jo end up with Laurie, despite Alcott’s refusal (“I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please any one,” Alcott wrote.)But as much as we want to be Jo, or Amy, or perhaps even Meg or Beth (although I seriously doubt the latter), this underlying fondness toward Jo and Laurie’s friendship continues to insinuate the cold truth: we are all Laurie—standing outside in the snow, watching the glittering lights of the March household in the night.

Laurie gets a bad rap in literature for being the boy-next-door-becomes-fuckboy. He grows up alongside the March family as Jo’s best friend, and becomes romantically linked to every sister at some point—whether by rumor or in actuality. Polygon’s Karen Han says it for the record: “[Laurie’s] a fuckboy. We all know it. We didn’t have the word for it until recently, but he is a fuckboy.” It’s a harsh assessment, and Timotheé Chalamet’s performance in the 2019 Little Women doesn’t help Laurie’s case. (He’s just a little bit too pretty with his angsty gaze and windswept hair.) But Little Women has never been the type of story to shy away from controversial points.

He’s a fuckboy. We all know it. We didn’t have the word for it until recently, but he is a fuckboy.

— Karen Han, Polygon

The ending of Little Women has always been contentious. There are disagreements on heroine’s eventual marriages, and director Greta Gerwig does not shy from making her own ending in the 2019 film even more ambiguous. In general, the sisters follow the same ending as their novel counterparts, with Jo being the last to unite with her romantic other, Bhaer, in the train station. It follows the novel’s dialogue: Bhaer: “I have nothing to give but my heart so full and these empty hands.” Jo: “They’re not empty now.” The scene is cut off by Jo’s editor, “It’s romantic!” he throws his arms in the air. Jo smiles, but we and her both know that Little Women was never about romantic love.

Romantic love is not a transcendent, euphoric, evangelium in Little Women. Saoirse Ronan’s Jo cries, “I’m so sick of people saying that love is just all that a woman is fit for.” Meg’s marriage is far from romanticized as she struggles with the burdens of a woman’s domestic life, and the “romance”-plots of Jo/Bhaer and Amy/Laurie aren’t a simple happy-ever-after.

In Jo/Bhaer’s relationship, we don’t really see the love between them. Their shared scenes could be read as a budding friendship or, at most, flirtation. Instead, we—and Jo—are told it by Amy. (“Jo, you love him,” she yells at Jo’s bewildered face.) Furthermore, Gerwig plays with the ending, leaving open an Inception-style twist. The film splices together the scene of Jo getting out of the carriage at the train station with a conversation with her editor who insists on a married ending for her heroine. This splicing—replaying the moment where Jo leaps out of the carriage—makes the audience conscious of an editorialized hand. When Jo meets Bhaer at the train station, the scene is overstuffed with swelling music and romantic dialog, a drastic tonal shift. It makes us suspicious and rightly so.

Nor do we necessarily see the romantic love between Amy and Laurie. We see the beginnings of their relationship, but Amy accepting Laurie’s proposal, their marriage, and even birth of their child occurs completely off-screen. It’s important to recognize that Florence Pugh empowers Amy through her practical awareness of marriage as an economic contract. Amy’s growth is from a selfish, petulant child to one that recognizes the economic need of her family and her responsibility to provide. We come to embrace Amy for her frank acknowledgment of society’s limitations on women, not because she falls in love.

Still, there is a warmth in Laurie’s relationship with Amy that is best expressed in 1994’s Little Women, where Christian Bale’s Laurie says in his proposal: “I have always known I should be part of the March family.” Little Women in 2019 doesn’t say it so many in words, but Chalamet’s longing gaze at the March family—the night Laurie first meets Jo and Meg at the ball—speaks the same volumes.

There is a kinder, more gentle view of Laurie that rests in that conviction of belonging to the March family and in that loving gaze. In Anatomy of a Scene’s preview of Little Women (2019), Gerwig breaks down the scene where Laurie, played by Chalamet, first enters the March household, helping to deliver Meg and Jo home after the ball. Gerwig says: “This is the first time you’re really inside the March house, looking at it through Laurie’s eyes, and seeing this kind of glorious female utopia.” It’s an idealized image, glossy and warm with the nostalgia of childhood and home, and as the audience, we are in the position of Laurie—standing apart as a spectator to the noise and chaos and love of the March household. Gerwig describes the moment, where Laurie’s presence and gaze, even as a male, is invisible, “He’s looking at them, but they’re existing naturally and he loves them because of who they are.”

Admittedly, it’s impossible to discuss Laurie’s bond with the March family without recognizing his friendship with Jo. Jo is, in a sense, Laurie’s mirror. In the novel, they bond over a love of books and plays, and their similarities are so deeply entrenched that when Laurie writes a prank letter, everyone assumes Jo is in on it. They define “ride-or-die” BFFs when Jo expresses concern over not being able to enter Heaven when she dies, and Laurie answering, “You’ll have me for company.” This bond is best captured in the novel when Laurie promises, “I’ll stand by you, Jo, all the days of my life,” and Jo responds, “I know you will.” It’s an intimate dynamic—platonic or otherwise. This is carried over to the film, where costume designer Jacqueline Durran notes, “Jo and Laurie even share clothing in the movie. We made duplicate costumes for them to wear in parallel, as if they were wearing each other’s clothes.” It creates a visual mirror which Ronan and Chalamet pull off beautifully. Moreover, this reflection accounts for audiences’ common identification with Jo. This mirroring between Jo and Laurie opens the possibility that it is not Jo who the audience is really identifying with, but rather Laurie.

Recognizing this parallel allows us to move past the marriage-plot-storylines, and recognize the true heart of Little Women—falling in love with the March family. We are brought back to that moment in the film where Laurie is standing in the snow outside the March household, the lights in the window shining bright against the darkness, as he glimpses the girls through the glass.

This is the love that we have for the March family. If there is a genuine romantic moment in Little Women, it is this longing gaze as Laurie watches, admires, and falls in love with the March women. Like us, Laurie is an outsider, a spectator, an audience to the life of the Little Women. We are all Laurie. Jo is our dear fellow who we would stand by all the days of our life, Amy teaches us to recognize our responsibility, Marmee is our mother, and we celebrate and cry alongside them. So come in out of the snow, we’ve always known we belonged with the March family.